BubbleStream

Alan Eysen

The Martini Club Mystery

Synopsis

Smart. Savvy. Retired. Bored. The ten members of The Martini Club include a former CIA operative, a one-time Washington ad man, an ex-journalist, a retired brothel owner, an ex-airline pilot, a non-practicing rabbi and a few corporate types. This eclectic group assembles once a month to drink gin martinis, debate great issues and tell stories that may or may not be true. When an enigmatic financier offers them a chance to get “back in the game” and turn one-million dollars into untold riches, the retirees jump at the opportunity. But their plans are quickly stymied by the suspicious death of a local landowner, forcing The Martini Club to sober up and investigate potentially deadly hidden agendas.

Author Biography

As an award-winning investigative journalist, editor and political columnist, Alan Eysen wrote for many years about real-world financial and political corruption. At Newsday, he served as a prominent member of the investigative team that won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for exposing misconduct involving Long Island public officials. After more than thirty years in journalism, he became a political consultant and experienced the other side of the story. Today, Eysen resides in the lowcountry of South Carolina, where he continues to write and be inspired by the colorful characters and harrowing situations he experienced firsthand as a reporter. He can often be found crafting his strong fictional characters with the help of an equally strong dry gin martini.

Author Insight

Martini Stories

I once knew a retired rabbi who maintained that he learned to enjoy martinis from Lauren Bacall, the wonderful actress who died in 2014, a month short of her 90th birthday. He confided in me that Bacall’s recipe for the silvery drink was six to one—six ounces of a good gin to one ounce of dry vermouth. The tale may have been apocryphal, but the resulting martini was excellent. I should also note that Bacall and martinis are linked through her husband, the late Humphrey Bogart, whose last words were bogusly reported to have been: “I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.” According to Bacall, his actual last words were: “Goodbye kid. Hurry back.” And, of course, who can forget that Bogart ran a bar in the classic movie Casablanca in which he uttered that famous line: “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” He was referring to Ingrid Bergman’s character.

Book Excerpt

The Martini Club Mystery

“What I admire about you, Nathan,” Brady said, “is that you can hold your liquor so well. In my ethnic persuasion, that would be considered a badge of honor. In yours, probably not so much.”

“True, especially since I am a rabbi.”

“A rabbi?” Brady responded in disbelief. “During my days in Washington, I ran into lots of Jews who could drink with the best, but none of them was a rabbi.”

“A heavy drinking Jew is the quintessential assimilationist. If he can drink like a goy, he can pass for a goy, so deep is the Jewish inferiority complex,” Ginsberg replied. “But passing for a goy doesn’t work well in the rabbi business. Congregations want rabbis not only to be Jewish, but to look Jewish and smell Jewish. That means, horseradish on your breath…yes; liquor on your breath…no. Fortunately, I am retired. I took up drinking after my working years. All that being said, there is precedence for having a drunken leader in the Bible.”

“Is this going to be a sermon on the virtues of drinking?” Brady asked in expectation of some witty Talmudic offering. “Being of Irish heritage and having labored in some of the best bars in D.C., I can say I need no conversion.”

“In your case, no conversion, just a little Jewish perspective,” Ginsberg responded. “I think you already understand the sins and virtues of alcohol. In Genesis, God decides he doesn’t like the life He has created on earth with Adam and Eve, so He tries again. He floods the world, and drowns everybody except for one righteous man, his family and a bunch of animals—there is some dispute as to their number—but in the end, all are saved, and life begins again on this lonely planet.”